October 15, 2021
"Could Led Zeppelin happen today? Could one of the world’s biggest bands get away with making albums without as much as their name on the cover..."
"... with making far-reaching, hugely ambitious music that veers anywhere from heavy metal thunder to folky laments, all bound together with lyrics that delve into the mysteries of the universe? The answer is a resounding no. 'We used to throw songs into the live set that we hadn’t recorded yet, just for fun.... We did that with Immigrant Song at Bath Festival in 1970, and nobody had heard anything like it. You don’t have that freedom now because it would be posted online immediately. It was a fun time as a creative musician, a fun time to be in a band.... The singles the Yardbirds were forced to make broke their spirit... I didn’t want to get caught up in it. You’d do Whole Lotta Love and then the record company would say of the next album: where’s the Whole Lotta Love? It was a trap.'... Page is mysterious, rather glamorous, and above all focused and organised.... Plant is... bumbling and haphazard.... 'When I’d had enough of being with Jimmy Page,' Plant said... 'When I’d had enough of being a rock star, I would go for long walks on the Welsh borders. It cleared my head.'"
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"albums without as much as their name on the cover..."
Albums? COVERS? what you talkin' about, Willis?
Listen to bootlegs of Pink Floyd shows from 1975 on YouTube, they opened their shows with 2 songs that were unknown, "Raving and Drooling" and 'You Gotta be Crazy". These songs would be re-worked and 2 years later appear on the Animals album as "Sheep" and "Dogs".
Still better than the crap music that is popular today. Wet @ss P*ssy was the song of the year last year. We HAVE gone THAT low.
Andrew Hickey begins his History of Rock Music in 500 songs with the observation that "Rock and Roll is dead." He's right, of course. Pop music, even hip-hop, is part of the culture, but it no longer defines it or drives the conversation. And while some folks make the case for someone like Lana Del Ray, Billie Eilish, or the latest hip-hop sensation, their sales and their impact is minimal. Not their fault. Pop music as we know it just hasn't changed much in the last 40 years. The difference between swing and rock was significant, but even good bands now are, for the most part, not that different from the music I grew up with in the late 60s and into the 80s.
Led Zeppelin was pretty good for a band.
The headline from this article seems to be in a screwed up world where people pay directly to media corporations for their music on a CD or some other archaic device.
"Trap Houses" of the Holy?
Mightn't Zeppelin be cancelled today for equating the Viking invasions to "immigrants"?
Maybe the pop icon Paul McCartney known for his anodyne superficial contributions to the art form will claim that Led Zeppelin was nothing but a blues cover band.
So it was a fun time to be a band, except when the record company was breaking their spirit? The guys in suits will always be with us, but my guess would be that today's world offers more avenues to success with less dependence on the music companies than in Led Zeppelin's day.
There were a lot of songs they were able to outright steal, because they were counting on the fact that these songs were too old to be remembered. That worked in 70’s, but wouldn’t work today with the internet.
It was a Hobbesian choice ~ the rewards of commercial success with the horrific host of agents, music companies, music critics, and entitled fans vs. obscurity playing what you like in small bars and venues. Rock bands made their deal with the devil but no doubt many regret big parts of the deal. However, I haven’t seen any give back the money. Nothing has changed since Hank Williams wrote “Lost Highway” or Dylan wrote “Desolation Row”
Radiohead. They do everything you mentioned - veer around genres, put out albums with songs they tested at shows, borrow, steal, and integrate a wide variety of sounds, ideas, and visuals.
Maybe that is why they are one of the top bands in the world. They just don't sound like Led Zeppelin.
What a wellspring were the Yardbirds. They had Clapton, Page (for a minute) and Jeff Beck, one after another. In one version, a Tele Beck gave to Page for getting him in the band was the one Page used years later to record Stairway.
Radiohead is the exception that proves the rule for me.
Will said, "Radiohead." Exactly. Led Zep could exist today for the same reason it could exist then. It takes a group of musicians absolutely determined to break with current musical convention and a record exec able to see value in what they do.
Rock is indeed dead. But the music today is very different from that of fifty years back. Rap is everywhere. Rock bands of the sort we once knew don't seem to make it into the charts. The focus is more on individual pop singers or rappers. I'd agree that there hasn't been the kind of generational shift that happened between the 40s and the 60s, but still, a lot has changed since the 70s. Rock may have to follow classical and jazz and start demanding subsidies.
David Byrne wrote that if government is going to subsidize music, it ought to subsidize the work of new, young creative people, not stodgy old self-styled elites and their classical traditions.
Listen to this podcast episode and see if you learn anything new about Led Zeppelin.
Led Zeppelin wasn't new, they stole lyrics (Whole Lotta Love) and blues riffs from other bands, and they were absolutely awful to listen to live. Their lyrics are garbage and full of misogyny.
Americans invented rock, they did it better, and the British Invasion bands were not very good.
I was a big Led Zeppelin fan 30 years ago. Then I listened to other music, and I got over it.
Music moves on, and it should. Obsessing over music marketed to teenagers fifty years ago is really weird.
Pointing to Radiohead as an indication that all is still well with music is a little silly. They've been making records for nearly 30 years. Same with Wilco, another innovative band. A mere 20 years or so separates them from Zep, King Crimson, and so on. Even in the 90s, that kind of prog-leaning music was unusual. It's nearly unheard of now, although you can find it if you look, and it's on small, small labels. Something like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.
"Americans invented rock, they did it better, and the British Invasion bands were not very good." The explosion of rock as a cultural and sales force is unthinkable without the British Invasion. The Stones, the Kinks, the Who...not very good! Just an appalling lack of judgement, even accounting for taste. Bob Dylan was moved to switch to rock because of the Beatles, et. al.
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